Researchers at the University of Washington and Yale University have proposed "a neighborly approach to file swapping, sharing preferentially with nearby computers. This would allow peer-to-peer traffic to continue growing without clogging up the Internet's major arteries, and could provide a basis for the future of peer-to-peer systems. A paper on the new system, known as P4P, will be presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications meeting in Seattle," says University of Washington News.

The researchers found that "the average peer-to-peer data packet currently travels 1,000 miles and takes 5.5 metro-hops, which are connections through major hubs. With the new system, data traveled 160 miles on average and, more importantly, made just 0.89 metro-hops, dramatically reducing Web traffic on arteries between cities where bottlenecks are most likely to occur."

Local traffic is cheaper for ISPs, and should enable faster downloads. The main drawback is that ISPs have to provide "a number that acts as a weighting factor for network routing".

In theory this is a great idea. However, P4P requires collaboration between the developers of filesharing clients and ISPs, which might be a problem. Indeed, most P2P companies TorrentFreak talked to are not that excited about the initiative, but they wont say that out loud, and play along for the time being.

There might even be a darker side to the project, as the P4P working group includes some prominent members of the entertainment industry and well known anti-piracy lobbyists. Besides that, we argue that it is likely that the technology might slow down transfers of people who are on ISPs that don't end up supporting the technology, raising serious Net Neutrality issues.

But P2P is now being used by broadcasters who want copyright protection, such as the BBC, not just pirates, and anything that makes such sharing more efficient than the current net-abusive BitTorrent protocol should help everyone. It could also help legitimate file-sharing replace copyright infringing file-sharing.